1. Project Theme and Possible Questions
1.1 The project proposes to study governmental practices in the
context of a developmental democracy such as India. The study of
governmental processes in a developmental democracy means focusing
on the inter-relations between democracy, development, and
governance. In the wake of globalisation and globalisation-induced
development the relation between governance and democracy has become
critical more than ever. Democratic governance means governing a
democracy, in particular governing the tensions, conflicts, claims
and collective claim makings that developmental processes and a
developmental regime provoke in a democracy. It also means
particular governing processes and structures. This research project
reflects all the three aspects of concern, namely, (a) the process
of governing a developmental democracy; (b) the relevant structures
of administering the task of governance, (c) and the popular
response to the agenda of developmental governance.
1.2 Against the backdrop of the first transition of democracy in
India from its origin in a colonial polity to the first phase of its
independent life after the promulgation of the Indian Constitution
in 1950, the project seeks to consider in details the interrelations
between globalisation, development and governance structures in the
current context of what many may consider to be the second
transition of democracy – this time to a democracy in a
globalisation induced economy. It suggests that while this study has
to reflect on governance of transition, it has to reflect on
how democracy negotiates this transition. Yet we have to remember
that the changes have not been mostly drastic; there have been
strong continuities; and changes have gradually emerged, even though
certain moments in the evolution of governmental technologies can be
considered as watersheds.
1.3 Two major things have happened in this scenario of continuity
and discontinuity: On one hand the welfare discourse changed to that
of rights and claims (due to popular politics, emergence of human
rights arguments, related developments in the juridical field, and
above all parliamentary democracy and therefore elections), with
citizens no longer accepting the legitimacy of governmental actions
and consequences on the given ground that these actions are
motivated by developmental inspirations. On the other hand, in the
socio-economic field some major changes have taken place. To put
these changes very briefly: Foreign direct investment and the Indian
corporate sector has grown phenomenally; it is now greatly connected
with public relations, media, glitz, and the economy of conspicuous
consumption; while external investment of Indian big business in
many non-traditional sectors is increasing, there are growing World
Bank-ADB-IMF-Japan-UK linkages for almost all infrastructure
development activities; at the same time agriculture is moving
slowly, some say it is in a crisis; labour force in number is
increasing, if at all, similarly very slowly, with the unorganised
sector’s condition remaining at a depressed level; farmers’
deaths/suicides epitomise the permanently depressed conditions of
certain areas of the country and among sections of the population;
the developmental projects are extracting heavy toll in the form of
massive displacement in different parts of the country, poverty
reduction has not shown any connectivity with global investments in
the country; and finally while expenditure is rising on issues of
defence, security, science establishment, intelligence, and crowd
control, still Dalits, indigenous population, minorities, and women
form the core of the India’s working population as well the most
impoverished sections of this population.
1.4 The point is to note - once again at least prima facie - the
impact of these changes, of which we mention only the barest of the
barest here, on the working of the government/s. We can note at
least the symptoms of various impacts of these changes on the style
and content of governance. For instance, the ascendancy of the
executive is overwhelming; The executive now represents detailed
governmental management of poverty, capital formation, urban growth,
development of infrastructure, social justice, communal relations,
and the gigantic and elaborate process of electoral democracy (three
times vote, parliament, electoral bureaucracy, etc.); at the same
time there is marked opposition to the organised consensus in
official politics about governmental ideas and policies on
development– brought about by the governmental management of
economic policies. Governmental ideas of development are countered
by ideas of dignity and rights, which represent deeper concerns
about issues of justice. Thus today’s developmental discourse has to
contend with the movements of the indigenous people for rights of
land, forest, and minimum wage, demands of various Dalit groups for
justice and affirmative actions, also the demands of the minorities,
particularly the Muslims, for better survival means. All these
indicate as mentioned briefly earlier a strong presence of rights
language in popular reception of the governmental approaches to
development.
1.5 In the light of these symptoms of changes (along with the
largely unmarked shifts) in governance structures we need to
inquire: What are the specifics of a governing process that seeks to
promote growth (of certain defined kinds) as development? Is there
any major difference between earlier governing process that promoted
development as welfare coupled with a specific state strategy of
industrialisation? What are the continuities and discontinuities in
governmental practices in the process of transition from welfare
orientation of government to a developmental regime instituted by a
pronounced market-friendly state? How has the change of national
focus from welfare rights, and equality to growth impacted on
democratic governance, and democratic politics at large? How have
people responded to the particular governing processes and
technologies? Do these responses “exceed” or defy the governmental
grids of power? Does the developmental process impact on the
dynamics of claim making in democratic politics? How has governing
privileged certain kinds of responses while censoring many others?
Why do we find vocal and protracted responses to such instruments
and mechanisms, such as the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (earlier
un-noticed or ignored) or the SEZ Act of 2005 etc, unlike in the
first two decades after Independence when the social cost of several
mega projects went unnoticed? As a corollary to the above, one may
also ask how does the style and form of governance of an area
afflicted by protracted insurgency impact on the issue of
developmental democracy? That is to say, are there similarities and
differences in governing ‘development’ in insurgent and
non-insurgent areas?
1.6. Let us look little more clearly at the situation, marked as it
is by these questions. Looking at India, we can say that a distinct
regime type is emerging. It can be named as the regime of
“developmental democracy”. Its features prima facie consist of: new
emphasis on development in place of welfare and citizens’
participation, the diminishing capacity of the state in terms of
assuring basic economic, social, and civil rights of the people,
shrinking legislation and deliberation process while the executive
is on the ascendancy; in this background the emergence in various
forms of the principle of autonomy as the route for the people to
claim agency for participation in polity, and finally the landscape
of social justice marked by a varying combination of legalities and
illegalities, lack of consensus about what constitutes development,
and fresh debates about the role of law in redistributing and
reconfiguring power and guaranteeing delivery mechanisms of justice.
Out of this interface we can note the phenomenon of a rapid
enunciation of policies by the Executive, aimed at increasing the
policy fund of the governing institutions – a phenomenon that can be
termed as “policy explosion” of the last decade (1997-2007).
1.7 Four features mark this complex scenario and these prompting
this research agenda:
(a) First, we must note the massive “securitisation” of governance
in the wake of developmental tasks. From taking over land to
building oil and gas pipelines, constructing airports to guarding
railway tracks, cleaning cities of lumpen elements, rioters,
vagrants, suspected terrorists, militants, and urban refugees – the
developmental discourse is now mixed with the security discourse.
The aim of security administration is to provide cover for the
developmental activities (Gandhamardan, Singur, Nandigram, Kosi
river bank management, construction of pipelines, to mention a few
instances), but more important, the developmental agenda has to be
governed in a war-like model – regimented, disciplined, command
structured, hierarchised, carefully budgeted in terms of provisions
– both hardware and software, and finally recreating the difference
between the military and the civilian now in form of developed areas
(IT cities for instance) and the back of beyond. Guarding,
maintaining, and protecting the circulation of life in form of
commodities, finance, information, and skill is the most significant
task of governance. If governance in this way produces
“illiberalism” what should be the democratic response?
(b) Second, governing in democracy has a fundamental tendency of
dividing up, rearranging, and reconfiguring the social and
geographical space it is governing. This has profound impact on the
liberal traditions of freedom – freedom to reside, move, visit, work
in a particular area, etc. Developmental agenda increases the
governmental power to reconfigure the space continually, and as the
Indian experience also suggests democratic governance introduces a
new spatial divide between the spaces that are ‘sacred’ and hence
are rendered as inaccessible to the many and the spaces where
hunger, famine and disease (like polio, malaria and AIDs) have
returned and are kept ‘isolated’ as ‘contagion’. The more we study
conflicts around the issue of displacement of massive groups of
population in the wake of riots, development, construction,
militarisation etc., and consequent loss of substantive citizenship,
the more important it becomes to study the relation between
governance and space. One interesting aspect to investigate would be
the way administrative services and institutions are spatially
organised, and the Indian way in which federalism has been practised
with all its implications for the relations between the government
and the people.
(c) Third, the question of democratic governance acquires particular
relevance in the context of governing a wide variety of cultures.
Nowhere is this more aptly illustrated than in the case of governing
the cultures of the marginalized and the Dalits. Governing cultures
has assumed myriad forms ranging from fixing and freezing cultures,
preserving, upgrading, plotting, and marking these cultures in a
whole hierarchy of cultures to make them “acceptable” to an official
policy of multiculturalism, once again crucial for developmental
agenda.
(d) Yet in discussing these, and this is the final point, we cannot
forget that the legitimacy of the government, more specifically
government of people’s conduct and lives, stems from the fact that
this government claims that it is the prime agency of people’s
lives. The institutionalisation of a strong patriarchal benevolent
image is from the colonial time - not only the huzur sarkar,
but also mai bap raj. Does this image undergo significant
change with the assumption of the “historically given task” of
national development and of catching up with other countries and
time? What happens then to the governmental task of delivering
justice, for which the citizens look up to the government? Does the
pattern or do the patterns of government-people interface change
significantly? Therefore one imaginative research (combining two
investigations) would be to (a) look into the Administrative
Commission Reports to find out the image/s in which the institution
of government has sought to see itself, and (b) conversely an
investigation into certain select movements that reflect the current
pattern of the government-people interface and thus show how the
dualities of service/servitude, development/control,
order/democracy, regulation/freedom, and finally rights/growth are
playing themselves out, and how governments while appearing as the
engine of development project (themselves as) a continuous order.
Needless to say, such a two-fold inquiry will be of enormous
significance for developmental democracy.
1.8 In sum, we are asking: (a) If development has required an
appropriate administration and has signalled certain changes
mentioned above, has it in the same measure responded to the
requirements of democracy? What has developmental governance done to
the quality of democracy? (b) What are the characteristics of a
developmental democracy? What are the major institutional landmarks
in promoting developmental democracy? These two broad questions
underpin the present project; their significance in the framework of
policy implications is enormous, and they are at the heart of the
following concrete research agenda. Indeed, from this discussion we
can visualise the agenda of the project.
Research Agenda
The project seeks to address certain concrete research questions:
-
The study of some select institutions and delivery mechanisms
(for instance, related to education, knowledge, public health,
water and electricity supply, inputs supply for small producers)
in order to assess the impact of the shift from the dynamics of
a welfare state to that of a state oriented towards
market-driven growth on ways of governing;
-
The study of the impact of some of the Acts and governmental
measures for acceleration of development (such as the Land
Acquisition Act or the Special Economic Zones) on the concept of
democratic equality and citizenship;
-
An investigation of the process of securitisation of the
conditions of development, resulting in making logistical
considerations as the dominant priority for the government, with
several other social considerations now turning into minor
matters, and related population groups as minor peoples;
-
The study of certain policy formulation processes and exercises
(such as, R&R Policy, Right to Information, NREGA, Forest Bill –
all of which reflect the new ways of government-people
interface) in the context of the policy explosion in India in
the last decade (1997-2007) as a feature of modern developmental
governance;
-
Study of the Administrative Commission Reports reflecting the
continuity/shift in the institutional grid of developmental
democracy;
-
An analysis of select popular responses reflecting new forms of
claim makings sparked off by developmental processes posing new
issues for developmental governance; this analysis will also
reflect on the ways in which different popular organisations are
emerging today to negotiate the changing relation between the
government and the people; and the ways in which these
organisations are breaking the old distinction between the
civil society and politics;
-
Similarly an analysis of select cases of political parties
articulating ideas of developmental governance particularly in
their electoral manifestos, which would show another channel of
inputs in the policy formulation process;
-
Investigation into the dynamics and the impact of the new
digital culture (primarily e-governance and the new electronic
media) on developmental democracy characterised by digital
divide;
-
Finally, an inquiry into cases that reflect on how the new
emphasis in legal and governmental discourses from rights and
entitlements to growth, prosperity, security, and national
prestige is impacting on federal structure, constitutional forms
of accommodation and autonomy, and spatial distribution of
developmental structures.
1.9 These inquiries are inter-related and the concerns overlap. The
various segments of the programme will be built around these
questions and concerns.
2. Proposed Activities and Organisation of the Program
Three Components
2.1 The project proposes to have three components –
-
Research
-
Organisation of dialogues, conference, workshops, public forums,
and public lectures (these are mainly in the nature of outreach
and dissemination activities, though they combine input
gathering purpose as well)
-
Organisation of web based material for wider circulation,
interaction, and web-based and print publications (these will be
mainly dissemination activities)
3.
Research Segment
3.1
The research segment will cover the nine major concerns listed above
and will consist of specific and focused ten to twelve (10-12)
research monographs/papers.
3.2
The research segment will build primarily around case studies among
which five or six institutions will form the core of the subject of
study. The case studies will involve field work, analysis of
governmental material, extensive interviews, studies of select cases
of policy formulation, study of institutions of representation at
select levels, reforms of welfare administration, development, and
information, and finally select studies of popular responses. The
actual cases (including topics of institutional studies) will be
decided in the first research workshop based on abstracts to be
discussed there.
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